Performance Monitoring

 

As I watch the Olympics I realize I'm not an elite athlete trying to get the last ounce of performance out of my body but I do like to keep track of my fitness to gauge my overall health. Since I have been riding a bike on a regular basis for over 30 years I have a lot of experience knowing how well I perform and what my limits are. For the past 10 years I have been using a heart rate monitor. I starting using a heart rate monitor as I was doing intervals to improve my fitness so I could improve my distance and climbing. I don't do intervals anymore as they didn't really help me perform better but monitoring my heart rate and other metrics has been useful. 

At the beginning of the season my average heart rate for a particular type of ride is usually a little higher than at the end of the season. As the season progresses my average heart rate comes down and when it hits a certain average I know I'm in good shape and can do longer and hillier rides. My average heart rate also usually helps me know when I'm getting sick as it goes up 3-5 beats a day or two before I feel sick.

For climbing performance I look at my max heart rate. This goes down as you age but mine hasn't gone down as much as some of the formulas out there predict. This is an indication of overall heart health. This is one of the reason I still do hills as it helps me work my heart in the different zones. This helps me measure myself against my previous performance and tells me if I'm maintaining my fitness or not. 

Speed is also a measure of performance. Although temperature, wind, humidity can affect the speed of a ride most of the rides I do fall into a small range depending how hilly they are. I do a lot of the same rides each year so I know what my average speed should be on most rides. Of course there are always outliers when I didn't eat or drink right and there are some days where I just feed good and can really push myself. 

This past fall because of the drop in my speed and increase in my heart rate I know I had some kind of problem. I thought it was some deep muscle strain but it turned out to be something else that caused problems with my blood resulting in a drop in my hemoglobin. If you have low hemoglobin you have problems getting oxygen into your blood and muscles so my average speed dropped and max heart rate rose quite a bit until the drugs I started to take kicked in and got my blood back to normal.

Because of my health problems I started wearing a fitness tracker (a Fitbit Charge 6). It has a built in heart rate monitor and all the other usual sensors. It keeps track of a lot of different things including resting heart rate, sleep schedule, steps breathing rate. It will even measure if my heart skips a beat or has some type of arrhythmia. I got it mainly to make sure the medicine I was taking didn't have any side affects that would affect my heart. So far it hasn't detected any problems. Using it I now have more information about my body which is useful. For example as the drugs I was taking starting working I could see my resting heart rate come down and my heart rate be more constant as I was walking around. Some of the things the fitness tracker measure like sleep stage are not probably that accurate but I do like having all this data so I can correlate how I'm feeling to what my stats are. 

On interesting thing about my fitness tracker is that it uses an LED to measure my heart rate. It measures the light scattered off blood vessels in the skin and somehow determines your heart rate. When these type of heart rate monitors first came out they weren't that accurate but the new ones are pretty good. I compared my fitness tracker against my chest strap and they tracked each other pretty well. Because of this when my Garmin chest strap that I used to measure my heart rate when I'm riding started malfunctioning. I decided that instead of replacing it I would try using the Wahoo Arm Band heart rate monitor that uses and LED instead of the Garmin electrode chest strap. I have used it a couple of times now and it seems to work as good as the chest strap and is a little more comfortable to wear. 

Having all this information about my body may be overkill but I do data science as part of my job so it is interesting to see the trends from the data that I'm collecting and think it can be useful in the future. 

This past Saturday was one of the better days of the year to ride. It was warm but not hot and low humidity for once. We did my Mansfield Almost Metric ride. This is a flat ride with a lot of long stretches of quite roads. This is almost always the fastest ride of the year and this year was the fastest one in a couple of years at 16.6 mph for 60 miles. I guess I was feeling good although I ended up getting their late because of road closure. The Mansfield community park was also packed because of some softball tournament so it was crowded and hard to park. So I was annoyed at the start

Once we got going we cranked it up and keep it at a speedy pace as everybody seemed to want to go fast. 

We made our usual stop at Nixon's because there is really no other place to stop. I started to cramp up about 4 miles from the end so I had to slow down a little as some of the others on the ride did a few extra miles to get in a metric (we are now calling adding the miles at the end of the ride to get some even number Giffing it up).

Even with the cramps I'm happy with my performance as I had a slow start to the year but can now say that I'm riding as good as before and the numbers are backing me up.

 

Ice Cream Can Fix Any Problem

The intense heat and humidity of the last few weeks has prevented me from doing hilly rides but fortunately we had a break this Saturday and I was able to get back into the hills. Laura ended up actually leading but she used one of my routes that goes thought the Sourlands over a few good hills without being too difficult and goes toward Round Valley without going to it or up the hills around it. It was a route that I know most of the posse would be able to do and so we would get most of them to join. Here is the route we did.

You can read details about the ride at Jim's and Laura's blog. It was a good ride in the usual Tom style with multiple road closures along the way. I felt good and didn't have a problem climbing any of the hills so I will doing more hilly rides as the weather allows. 

The 50 miles and 2400 ft of climbing did catch up with me on the ride home. I cramped up about halfway home but it was right by one of my favorite ice cream places on Rt 33 so I stopped and grabbed a cone. It only took a few licks of the cone for my cramps to go away. Now it could have been the fact that I go out of the car and walked around or that the gator aid I drank when I got back from the ride finally kicked it but I'm pretty sure it was the ice cream.

Dripping with Sweat

The last two weeks have been almost too hot to ride. But of course as long as it is not raining and under 100 degrees I will find a way to ride. The past Wednesday I tried to get out 7:30am so I could be back before the temperature hit 90 degrees. I didn't quite make it as the temperature increased faster than I thought. It's not really the heat that is the problem it is the combination of the heat and the humidity. About an hour into my 30 mile ride I was sweating so much that I was raining sweat all over my bike. I don't think I have ever sweated more than I did on that ride. I actually had to slow down a little at the end of the ride because the heat and humidity were getting to me. 

The good news is that I have ridden enough in the hot weather to know how to deal with it. So although I was sweating my ass off I made it back without a problem. However even when I go home in the air conditioning it took my body an hour to stop sweating. 

This Sunday I lead a ride out of Etra. We did a easy 42 mile loop with a few rolling hills. Most of the posse were off doing their own thing but I had a few of them join me along with a couple of new people. It was hot and humid like any other day of the past couple of weeks but not as bad as Wednesday. I guess I am getting acclimated to the hot weather because I didn't feel the heat as much. 

I was still dripping with sweat for the entire ride but I guess I had hydrated myself properly because I didn't have a problem keeping up with everybody and we moved along at a decent pace. Still it was a grind in the heat. We never got to death march status but I was glad when we were finished. 

This heat and humidity is making me do shorter rides so hopefully we can get a few normal day in the near future so I can do longer and more enjoyable rides.